India launches rocket carrying dozens of satellites

January 12, 2018

India launched a rocket carrying dozens of satellites from India and six other countries Friday from its island space center.

A. S. Kiran Kumar, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, said the satellites successfully reached orbit after the polar satellite launch vehicle took off from Sriharikota, an island off Andhra Pradesh state in the country's southeast..

Apart from two Indian weather satellites, the rocket carried 28 micro and nano-satellites from Canada, Finland, France, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The lift-off was postponed by a minute because of fear of collision with space debris, the New Delhi Television news channel said. The last launch of India's first privately built satellite failed in August because of a heat shield problem.

Friday's launch is the latest in a string of successes for the Indian space agency. Last June, India launched its heaviest-ever rocket it hopes will eventually be able to carry astronauts into space, a feat only Russia, the United States and China have achieved.

In 2013, India launched a space probe that has been orbiting Mars since September 2014.

A countdown began Saturday for next week's launch of an Indian rocket that will carry seven satellites into orbit, including an Indo-French venture for studying the world's oceans, India's space agency said.

Measuring the mass of a celestial body is one of the most challenging tasks in observational astronomy. The most successful method uses binary systems because the orbital parameters of the system depend on the two masses. ...

On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare—an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips ...

NASA has powered on its latest space payload to continue long-term measurements of the Sun's incoming energy. Total and Spectral solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1), installed on the International Space Station, became fully ...